In the spring of 1782, a group of women made their way across the Cotswolds to Sudeley Castle, where the fifteenth-century castle lay in ruins against the backdrop of the rolling hills. Their visit was antiquarian in interest and was inspired by the recently published New History of Gloucestershire by Samuel Rudder. Their attention was drawn to the chapel, long out of use and scarcely with any roof left (Fig. 10). Rudder's book lamented its sad state: ‘There is nothing remaining of the church but the shell or outer walls (by which it appears to have been a neat building, adorned with battlements and pinnacles all round) except a small aile, called the chapel, where divine service is performed once a fortnight’. Observing a large block of alabaster against the north wall of the chapel, they speculated that the block marked the location of an old sepulchral monument – a monument that was catalogued in Rudder's book. Upon closer inspection they found they were right; and after enlisting the help of some local men to dig, they found, barely two feet below the surface, a lead envelope inscribed with the name of Katherine Parr, the sixth and last wife of Henry VIII, who had died two centuries earlier, in 1548. It was exactly what they were looking for.

Rudder's New History of Gloucestershire was a massive book of over eight hundred folio pages. It was also expensive, at two and a half guineas – but well worth the cost to anyone with antiquarian interest in local history. It catalogued exhaustively the natural history of the area, its important buildings and residences, its historical and cultural artefacts, and its churches, monuments, and tombs. Rudder's New History provided a detailed description of Sudeley Castle and its grounds. Despite the fact that it lay in ruins, the castle was still beautiful, still architecturally significant, and still historically important. Royalist troops had quartered there during the Civil War before Oliver Cromwell ordered the castle to be ‘slighted’, or wrecked, so that it would be unusable for further royalist occupation. A century before those events, the castle had been the home of Thomas Seymour during his marriage to Katherine Parr, and it was also at that time home to the young Elizabeth I and Lady Jane Grey.